Silver Sparrow

Born with complications due to being born a premature baby, Chaurisse is “utterly ordinary” as a child. She remains average throughout her life—not bad, but also not especially good at anything. She is a hard worker, if untalented, holding two jobs in high school. Her life has little direction until she meets Dana Lynn, whom she finds enigmatic and hopes to make her best friend, something she has lacked for the duration of her life.

Chaurisse’s personality comes alive when she finds out Dana Lynn is her sister. Her visceral anger at Dana Lynn and James reveals her to be a passionate, loving soul who just has not yet found where to lay that passion.

James is a “bigamist” with a stutter who has an agreeable demeanor despite being selfish. He is known around town as an African American “entrepreneur” as he owns a small fleet of limos along with his business partner and adopted brother, Raleigh. He is almost always wearing his chauffeur’s uniform and is proud of his business. 

James is described by his daughter Chaurisse as “medium everything,” but what initially appears to be timidity in James is actually cowardice. After simultaneously wooing both his wife, Laverne, and a check-out girl named Gwen, James ends up impregnating them both at about the same time. In his attempt to set things right, he marries Gwen while still married to Laverne and secretly cares for Gwen and Dana Lynn one day of the week, also providing financial support for them. As a result, he spends nearly two decades living a lie that he must constantly fight to keep in place. When he is finally caught, he grovels to Laverne and abandons Gwen and Dana Lynn. His true colors are revealed when Dana Lynn asks him to still love her even though she exposed his lie and he refuses.

Gwen is Dana Lynn’s mother and James’s second, concurrent wife. She is a “pretty” African American woman who is a “magician” with words. Gwen is described as follows: “She always smelled good, like flowery perfume, and sometimes like my father’s cigarettes” (11), and this description reflects her personality as she is rarely allowed to be her own woman, constantly being defined by her husband, or lack of one.

Before Gwen became Dana Lynn’s mother, she was abandoned by her own mother at three months old and was later abandoned by her father as a young adult when he disagreed with her decision to leave her husband. The husband in question was her high school sweetheart, whom she realized she wasn’t in love with shortly after they were married. Not long after leaving him, Gwen was working as the first black gift wrapper at Davison’s department store when she fell in love with a married customer, James Witherspoon.

Gwen is invested and protective as a mother and wife. As Willie Mae says to Dana Lynn, “Whatever you want to say about her […] you can never say that she betrayed you” (143). She defends Dana Lynn and supports James in whatever way he will allow her.

In the end, when she witnesses James endanger Dana Lynn’s life to save his own, she loses all semblance of control and goes out of her way to antagonize Laverne and Chaurisse. Pushed to the edge, the book seems to suggest, even the prettiest and most polished of women falls apart.

Laverne is James Witherspoon’s “round” and “motherly” first wife. James made her a teenage mother and bride, which she initially was miserable about. She soon learned to love her new life, however, surrounded by Miss Bunny, James, and Raleigh. She gradually but wholeheartedly took up the role of wife and often concentrated all her energy on fulfilling this particular identity.

Though she owns a beauty shop, she appears to be just as good at providing marriage advice as she is at fixing hair. It is greatly ironic, then, when Laverne finds out she had spent almost her whole marriage being cheated on. Her voluble grief and her subsequent refusal to give James up prove that in the end, Laverne is still very much like the frightened 14-year-old girl she was when James’s family first took her in.